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Amid the bustle of New York's urban core on a Wednesday in May 2022, James Cromwell entered a Starbucks, affixed his hand to a counter, and complained about the surcharges on vegan milks. “When will you stop making excessive earnings while customers, creatures, and the planet suffer?” Cromwell declared as other protesters streamed the protest live.

But, the insouciant patrons of the coffee shop paid little heed. Maybe they didn’t know they were in the presence of the most statuesque person ever nominated for an acting Oscar, deliverer of one of the most memorable monologues in Succession, and the only actor to say the words “star trek” in a sci-fi franchise production. Police arrived to shut down the store.

“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell muses three years later. “They would come in, hear me at the full volume speaking about what they were doing with these vegan options, and then they would move past to the far corner, get their order and wait looking at their cellphones. ‘We’re facing doom of the world, folks! It’s going to end! We have 15 minutes!’”

Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest activists who act – or maybe activist-actors is more fitting. He marched against the Southeast Asian conflict, supported the Black Panthers, and took part in nonviolent resistance protests over animal rights and the climate crisis. He has lost count of how many times he has been detained, and has even served time in jail.

But now, at eighty-five, he could be seen as the symbol of a disillusioned generation that marched for global harmony and social advances at home, only to see, in their later life, Donald Trump reverse the clock on reproductive rights and many other achievements.

Cromwell certainly looks and sounds the part of an old lefty who might have a revolutionary poster in the loft and consider a political figure to be too soft on capitalism. When interviewed at his home – a wooden house in the rural community of Warwick, where he lives with his third wife, the actor his partner – he stands up from a seat at the fireplace with a warm greeting and outstretched hand.

Cromwell stands at 6ft 7in tall like a great weathered oak. “Probably 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a fascist state,” he says. “We have ready-made oppression. The mechanism is in the lock. All they have to do is the one thing to turn it and open a source of trouble. Out will come every exception, every exception that the legislature has written so assiduously into their laws.”

Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father John Cromwell, a renowned Hollywood director and actor, was blacklisted during the 1950s purge of political persecution merely for making remarks at a party praising aspects of the Soviet arts system for nurturing young talent and contrasting it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.

This seemingly innocuous observation, coupled with his leadership of the “Hollywood Democrats” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to his father being called to testify to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had nothing substantive to say but a committee emissary still demanded an expression of regret.

John Cromwell refused and, with a large payment from a wealthy businessman for an unproduced work, moved to New York, where he acted in a play with Henry Fonda and won a Tony award. James muses: “My father was not harmed except for the fact that his best friends – a lot of them – cut him out and wouldn’t talk to him because he had been called to testify. They didn’t care whether the person was guilty or not – sort of like today.”

Cromwell’s mother, Kay Johnson, and his stepmother, Ruth Nelson, were also accomplished actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially reluctant to follow in their footsteps. “I avoided for as long as possible. I was going to be a technical professional.”

But, a visit to Sweden, where his father was making a film with Ingmar Bergman’s crew, proved to be a pivotal moment. “They were creating something and my father was engaged and was working things out. It was very exciting stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I gotta do this.’”

Art and politics collided again when he joined a theatre company founded by African American performers, and toured an playwright’s play a classic work for predominantly Black audiences in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and an area. Some shows took place under security protection in case extremists tried to attack the theatre.

Godot struck a nerve. At one performance in Indianola, Mississippi, the social advocate a historical figure urged the audience: “I want you to pay attention to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not waiting for anything. Nobody’s giving us anything – we’re seizing what we need!”

Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the southern US. I went down and the rooming house had a sign on the outside, ‘Segregated accommodation’. I thought: ‘That’s a historical marker, obviously, back from the 1860s conflict.’ A kind Black lady took us to our rooms.

“We went out to have dinner, and the proprietor of the restaurant came over and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’ I’d never been ejected of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my clenched hand. I would have done something rash. a company founder informed the man that he was violating our civil rights and that they would investigate fully of it.”

However, mid-anecdote, Cromwell stops himself and addresses the interviewer directly. “I’m hearing my words,” he says. “These are not just tales about an actor doing his thing growing up, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his record spotless, trying not to get hurt. People were being killed, people were being assaulted, people were being fired upon, people had symbols of hate on their lawns.

“I feel uncomfortable recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘My story’. People ask if I should write a book because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of various activities as well as acting.”

Later, his wife will reveal that she is among those urging Cromwell to write a autobiography. But he has minimal interest for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be predictable and “because my father tried it and it was so bad even his wife, who loved him, said: ‘That’s really stinky, John.’”

The conversation continues with his story all the same. Cromwell had been notching up film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career skyrocketed thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in Babe, a 1995 film about a pig that aspires to be a herding dog. It was a surprise hit, grossing more than $250m worldwide.

Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in the film, spending $sixty thousand to hire a PR representative and buy industry ads to promote his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The risk paid off when he received the honor, the kind of recognition that means an actor is given roles rather than having to go through tryouts.

“I wouldn’t be here if I had not gotten a nomination,” he says, “because I was so sick of the dance that had to be done when you did an audition. I finally asked a filmmaker: ‘What was it about the audition that made you give me the part? I did it no differently than I’ve done anything.’ He said: ‘James, it has nothing to do with your performance; we just want to see that you’re the kind of guy we want to spend four weeks with.’

“It was the insecurity which, because I knew him, didn’t show as much as it did when I went in to audition with a unknown person who I identified as my father. I had the thing from my father – there he is again in me, telling me I’m not worthy, I’ll not succeed in the reading. I was just extremely sick of it.”

The recognition for the movie led to roles including leaders, popes and Prince Philip in Stephen Frears’ The Queen, as the industry tried to pigeonhole him. In Star Trek: First Contact he played the interstellar pioneer a character, who observes of the spaceship crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of cosmic journey.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “unsavory” business driven by “avarice” and “the bottom line”. He criticises the focus on “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine discussion on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of online followings on casting decisions. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “industry” as secondary to “the deal”. He also admits that he can be a difficult on set: “I do a lot of disputing. I do too much yelling.”

He offers the example of a film, which he describes as a “genius piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s intimidating Captain Dudley Smith asks an actor’s a role, “Have you a valediction, boyo?” before killing him. Spacey, by then an Oscar winner, disagreed with filmmaker and co-writer Curtis Hanson over what Vincennes should reply. A quietly defiant Spacey won their disagreement.

This prompted Cromwell to try a alteration of his own. Hanson objected. “Sure enough, he stands behind me and says: ‘Jamie, I want you to say the line the way it was written.’ But not having Kevin’s experience and his tendencies, I said: ‘You expletive, curse you, you insult! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive